A number of cellular telephone services provide a number of different calling and data plans, including subscription plans and pay-as-you-go plans. In some known subscription plans, for a pre-specified monthly subscription cost (e.g., $50/month), the customer is provided with a pre-specified number of minutes (e.g., 200 minutes/month) or a pre-specified amount of data usage (e.g., 10 GB/month of data). (As used herein, “pre-specified units” will be used as the general term for either a pre-specified number of minutes or a pre-specified amount of data usage.) Known subscription plans with an amount of pre-specified units generally fall into two categories: (1) capped plans where a customer is not allowed to go over its pre-specified units (in order to control costs) and (2) “pre-specified+” plans where after the customer has used its pre-specified units additional units (or blocks of units) are charged at a known rate.
Alternatively, some subscription plans are “unlimited” plans where a customer is provided an unlimited amount of units for its subscription (e.g., weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly). In one embodiment, the service provider provides differing levels of service as the number of units used by the customer exceeds one or more thresholds (e.g., by providing slower, but still unlimited data service over the first 10 GB of data used in a subscription period). In another embodiment, the level of service is the same for the whole subscription period.
Some known cellular providers also provide a pay-as-you-go service where the user is not charged a (e.g., monthly) subscription, but the customer pays as the units are used (typically at a higher per-unit cost than would be available through a subscription). This billing method is often used by customers with smaller unit needs, and such services may either be pre-paid (often with the ability to “top-up” or add more units) or post-paid (where the customer gets a bill for the usage at the end of the billing period). However, using the pay-as-you-go service, there has been no way to control costs when usage is higher than an expected maximum. This causes a customer to either have to buy additional units to continue communicating (in a pre-paid environment) or risk having a large bill (in a post-paid environment).